Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.

If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies.

Learn to fail with pride - and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error - by mastering the error part.

When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.

You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement.

There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small.

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.

Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.

Restaurants get you in with food to sell you liquor; religions get you in with belief to sell you rules.

We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future-but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.

The more data we have, the more likely we are to drown in it.

Economic, financial, and political predictors… are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients—and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking.

Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse

Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears

It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.

Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.

If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don't do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.